Industry News

Kathy Sierra wrote a brilliant post about loyalty called Your customer won’t take a bullet for you. She makes the point that to understand loyalty, we have to realize that we aren’t loyal to products, we’re loyal to ourselves:

If you want to benefit from a customer’s loyalty to himself, you can’t bribe it, you must earn it. Deserve it. Focus not on upgrading your product but upgrading your user’s capabilities. If you can’t enhance your product, enhance the context in which your product is...

Hi Marketer – Let’s find out how good your marketing intuition is!

I’m going to show you two different variations of a landing page that I recently tested. One variation outperformed the other significantly in an A/B test. Can you guess which variant did best in the test?

Post a comment with your best guesstimate. I’ll post the test results next week, so you can find out how accurate your gut feeling was. Background info

I recently published a free ebook on conversion optimization...

In Idle minds L.M. Frank writes about what happens inside our brains when we’re not actively working on or thinking about something:

Some researchers now think that resting-state networks may prime the brain to respond to stimuli. “The system is not sitting there doing nothing and waiting,” says [Andreas Kleinschmidt, director of research at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research's Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit]. Cycling activity in these networks may be helping the...

The question of big sites vs small sites and how they rank in Google has always been one of those questions SEOs have asked. In fact, it seems that only 30% of SEOs believe web site size does not matter in terms of rankings...

John Tierney writes about the benefits of reminiscing in What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows:

Nostalgia has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety. It makes people more generous to strangers and more tolerant of outsiders. Couples feel closer and look happier when they’re sharing nostalgic memories. On cold days, or in cold rooms, people use nostalgia to literally feel warmer. […]

Nostalgia serves a crucial existential function,” Dr. [Clay...

While uncovering and fixing technical issues has always been an important part of SEO, in the wake of Panda and Penguin, technical SEO has moved closer to the forefront. You may have thought that the better Google gets, the less effect technical problems would have on SEO -- I know I did. But in fact, it has been the opposite.

As you may remember, Google announced they are replacing the external keyword tool with the Google Keyword Planner tool.

Well, it took some time...

When I talk about, or write about entities, it’s normally in the context of specific people, places, or things. Google was granted a patent recently which discusses a different type of entity, in a more narrow manner. These entities are referred to as “search entities”, and the patent uses them to predict probabilities and understand [...]

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